Aktionsart is pleased to announce the exclusive online world premiere of WINCHESTER REDUX (2004) by Jeremy Blake, a special abridged version of Blake's highly acclaimed Winchester trilogy.
View the Online World Premiere in FEATURE, a video on demand (VOD) program curated and distributed by Aktionsart.
FEATURE is presented on an online cinema (MUBI Garage), an outdoor cinema in midtown Manhattan (Big Screen Project) and the MUBI Sony Playstation App. A sequence of artist interviews and educational materials will also be released in MUBI Garage Production Notes.
Courtesy of Kinz + Tillou Fine Art.
The Winchester trilogy and WINCHESTER REDUX are inspired by my interest in the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. The Mansion is an architectural wonder that Sarah Winchester, widow of the heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, constructed over the course of 38 years, beginning in the late 1800's. After suffering the premature death of her child and then her husband, Winchester, informed by her deep belief in Spiritualism, concluded that the angry spirits of those struck down by her family's guns had cursed her. An advisor agreed and suggested that she build an enormously large house--an endeavor that would both accommodate good spirits and ward off evil ones with the sounds of never ending construction. The result is an eccentric, sprawling 160-room mansion, well outfitted for the undead with staircases going nowhere, doorways leading out into open air several stories above ground, and miles of darkened hallways for the spirits to roam.
The Winchester films combine 8mm film footage, static 16mm shots of old photographs, hundreds of ink drawings, and intricate frame-by-frame digital retouching. They are meant to provide an abstract and emotional tour--not so much of the architecture, but of some of the more fearful chambers of Sarah Winchester's mind. The abstract imagery represents supernatural activity, heightened by paranoiac glimpses of shadowy gunfighters, painterly gunshot wounds blossoming into Rorschach patterns, and a spectrum of images from Winchester rifle advertisements. The entire series is informed by the idea that the Victorian aesthetic (embodied by the Mansion's architecture) and the psychedelic sensibility (referenced through hallucinatory manipulation of the film) are sympathetic opposites.
My interest in the Mansion is rooted in an understanding that the site is more than just a monument to one person's eccentric preoccupation-it is the tangible outcome from a collision of social and historical narratives. The series ties together several mythic strands fundamental to an American national identity in an attempt to justify Winchester's architectural free-for-all. The figure of the gunfighter facilitates spiritual regeneration through violence, and lawmen and outlaws are thus treated with reverent trepidation-as are the ghosts of their victims.
Beneath the dreamlike flow of images, the structure of the films is very deliberate. They first explore the exterior of the Winchester Mansion, and then reveal glimpses of the interior, with an emphasis on parts destroyed in the earthquake of 1906. Sarah Winchester chose not to repair certain damaged sections, preferring to build around them, as she imagined that the house's resident spirits disapproved of these accommodations. The camera next zooms in on a cinema complex of three space-age movie theaters situated across the street: Century 21, Century 22, and Century 23, alluding to the fact that it is film, TV and the media that perpetuate the icon of the gunfighter. This is represented by richly layered montages of the Old West and pop-culture imagery, as well as art and film celebrities who appear as phantom stand-ins to embody the specters of the Cowboy and of Sarah Winchester herself.
The Winchester series distills and abstracts American myths of violence and spiritual reconciliation.
Jeremy Blake
2004
Artist Bio
Jeremy Blake (1971 - 2007) was an artist of recognized accomplishment and promise. His artistic achievements and career were fast on the rise. He was considered influential and iconoclastic. Sadly, Blake committed suicide in July 2007 in New York City one week after his beloved companion of 12 years, Theresa Duncan, committed suicide - the reasons for which remain open only to conjecture.
Blake first garnered attention in the late 1990s with his large-scale, semi-abstract digital C-prints that rendered the appearance of being paintings and photographs, but were neither. He then began to animate sequences of such images to create continuously looping digital video works that emulated paintings and film, but were neither. His visually dense images often incorporated both abstract and representational expressions through the language of Modernism and voices of Film Noir. Blake's aesthetically stylized works addressed a range of subjects from violence and terrorism to glamour and decadence, from metaphors of architectural spaces to profiles of cultural personifications.
Blake's works have been exhibited internationally. They were included in three Whitney Biennials, are represented in fourteen museum collections, and are a topic of dissertations and textbooks. He is widely acclaimed as a pioneer in merging the traditions of painting with a new digital world. He created hybrids of new media works, new genres, and a new kind of art experience. He made "paintings" that were digital prints and films that were "moving paintings". He was an innovator who opened doors to how others will express themselves long into the future.
Blake continued to challenge our expectations, as well as his own. He dissolved the distinction between object and time-based art while combining abstraction and representation in fresh and exciting ways. He used the most eloquent of formal vocabularies to illustrate hidden stories, present cinematic portraits and portray social perspectives. He was a narrative abstractionist who embraced history, pop culture, biography and fiction, and he always made things to be beautiful. His works are seductive; his subjects are provocative; his meanings are profound.
Curated by Julia Fryett.